The Street Called Straight Part 3

"It was Hallett--Peter Hallett."

"Hallett, was it? Well, it will do no harm for a young Caesar of finance like you to see what you may come to if you're not careful. Morituri te salutamus, as the gladiators used to say. Only I wish it was to be the arena and the sword instead of the court-room and the Ride with Morrowby Jukes."

Davenant said nothing, not because he had nothing to say, but because his thoughts were incoherent. Perhaps what was most in the nature of a shock to him was the sight of a man whom he both admired for his personality and honored as a pillar of Boston life falling so tragically into ruin. While it was true that to his financially gifted mind any misuse of trust funds had the special heinousness that horse-lifting has to a rancher, yet as he stood with Guion's hand on his shoulder he knew that something in the depths of his being was stirred, and stirred violently, that had rarely been affected before. He had once, as a boy, saved a woman from drowning; he had once seen a man at an upper window of a burning house turn back into the fire while the bystanders restrained him, Davenant, from attempting an impossible rescue.

Something of the same unreasoning impulse rose up within him now--the impulse to save--the kind of impulse that takes no account of the merit of the person in peril, seeing only the danger.

But these promptings were dumb in him for the moment from lack of co-ordination. The two or three things he might have said seemed to strangle each other in the attempt to get right of way. In response to Guion's confidences he could only mumble something incoherent and pa.s.s on to the drawing-room door. It was a wide opening, hung with portieres, through which he could see Olivia Guion standing by the crackling wood fire, a foot on the low fender. One hand rested lightly on the mantelpiece, while the other drew back her skirt of shimmering black from the blaze. Drusilla Fane, at the piano, was strumming one of Chopin's more familiar nocturnes.

He was still thinking of this glimpse when, a half-hour later, he said to Rodney Temple, as they walked homeward in the moonlight: "I haven't yet told you what I came back for."

"Well, what is it?"

"I thought--that is, I hoped--that if I did the way might open up for me to do what might be called--well, a little good."

"What put that into your head?" was the old man's response to this stammering confession.

"I suppose the thought occurred to me on general principles. I've always understood it was the right thing to attempt."

"Oh, right. That's another matter. Doing right is as easy as drawing breath. It's a habit, like any other. To start out to do good is much like saying you'll add a cubit to your stature. But you can always do right. Do right, and the good'll take care of itself."

Davenant reflected on this in silence as they tramped onward. By this time they had descended Tory Hill, and were on the dike that outlines the sh.o.r.es of the Charles.

By a common impulse both Temple and Davenant kept silent concerning Guion. On leaving Tory Hill they had elected to walk homeward, the ladies taking the carriage. The radiant moonlight and the clear, crisp October air helped to restore Davenant's faculties to a normal waking condition after the nightmare of Guion's hints. Fitting what he supposed must be the facts into the perspective of common life, to which the wide, out-of-door prospect offered some a.n.a.logy, they were, if not less appalling, at least less overwhelming. Without seeing what was to be done much more clearly than he had seen an hour ago, he had a freer consciousness of power--something like the matter-of-course a.s.sumption that any given situation could be met with which he ordinarily faced the world. That he lacked authority in the case was a thought that did not occur to him--no more than it occurred to him on the day when he rescued the woman from drowning, or on the night when he had dashed into the fire to save a man.

It was not till they had descended the straggling, tree-shaded street--along which the infrequent street-lamps threw little more light that that which came from the windows shining placidly out on lawns--and had emerged on the embankment bordering the Charles, that the events of the evening began for Davenant to weave themselves in with that indefinable desire that had led him back to Boston. He could not have said in what way they belonged together; and yet he could perceive that between them there was some such dim interpenetration as the distant lamps of the city made through the silvery mist lying on the river and its adjacent marshes like some efflorescence of the moonlight.

"The difficulty is," he said, after a long silence, "that it's often so hard to know what _is_ right."

"No, it isn't."

The flat contradiction brought a smile to the young man's lips as they trudged onward.

"A good many people say so."

"A good many people say foolish things. It's hard to know what's right chiefly when you're not in a hurry to do it."

"Aren't there exceptions to that rule?"

"I allowed for the exceptions. I said _chiefly_."

"But when you _do_ want to do it?"

"You'll know what it is. There'll be something to tell you."

"And this something to tell you? What do you call it?"

"Some call it conscience. Some call it G.o.d. Some call it neither."

Davenant reflected again.

"And you? What do you call it?"

"I can't see that anything would be gained by telling you. That sort of knowledge isn't of much use till it's worked out for oneself. At least, it wouldn't be of much use to you."

"Why not to me?"

"Because you've started out on your own voyage of discovery. You'll bring back more treasures from that adventure than any one can give you."

These things were said crustily, as though dragged from a man thinking of other matters and unwilling to talk. More minutes went by before Davenant spoke again.

"But doesn't it happen that what you call the 'something-to-tell-you'

tells you now and then to do things that most people would call rather wild--or crazy?"

"I dare say."

"So what then?"

"Then you do them."

"Oh, but--"

"If there's an 'Oh, but', you don't. That's all. You belong to the many called, but not to the few chosen."

"But if things _are_ wild--I'm thinking of something in particular--"

"Then you'd better leave it alone, unless you're prepared to be considered a wild man. What Paul did was wild--and Peter--and Joan of Arc--and Columbus--and a good many others. True they were well punished for their folly. Most of them were put in irons, and some of them got death."

"I shouldn't dream of cla.s.sing myself in their company."

"Every one's in their company who feels a big impulse and has the courage of it. The trouble with most of us is that we can do the feeling all right; but when it comes to the execution--well, we like to keep on the safe side, among the sane."

"So that," Davenant began, stammeringly, "if a fellow got something into his head--something that couldn't be wrong, you know--something that would be right--awfully right in its way, but in a way that most people would consider all wrong--or wild, as I said before--you'd advise him--?"

"I shouldn't advise him at all. Some things must be spontaneous, or they're of little use. If a good seed in good ground won't germinate of its own accord, words of counsel can't help it. But here we are at home.

You won't come in just yet? Very well; you've got your latch-key."

"Good-night, sir. I hope you're not going to think me--well, altogether an idiot."

"Very likely I shall; but it'll be nothing if I do. If you can't stand a little thing like that you'd better not have come back with the ideas that have brought you."

III

Davenant turned away into the moonlit mist. Through it the electric lamps of Boston, curving in crescent lines by the water's edge, or sprinkled at random over the hill which the city climbs, shone for him with the steadiness and quiet comfort inherent in the familiar and the sure after his long roaming. Lighting a cigarette, he strode along the cement pavement beside the iron railing below which the river ran swiftly and soundlessly. At this late hour of the evening he had the embankment to himself, save for an occasional pair of lovers or a group of sauntering students. Lights from the dignified old houses--among which was Rodney Temple's--overlooking the embankment and the Charles threw out a pleasant glow of friendliness. Beyond the river a giant shadow looming through the mist reminded him of the Roman Colisseum seen in a like aspect, the resemblance being accentuated in his imagination by the Stadium's vast silence, by its rows upon rows of ghostly gray sedilia looking down on a haunted, empty ring. His thoughts strayed to Rome, to Cairo, to Calcutta, to Singapore, to the stages of those two patient journeys round the world, made from a sense of duty, in search of a widening of that sheerly human knowledge which life had hitherto denied him. Having started from London and got back to London again, he saw how imperfectly he had profited by his opportunities, how much he had missed. It was characteristic of him to begin all over again, and more thoroughly, conscientiously revisiting the Pyramids, the Parthenon, and the Taj Mahal, endeavoring to capture some of that true spirit of appreciation of which he read in books.